The Spirit of St. Louis (1957)

Director:

Billy Wilder

Writers:

Charles A. Lindbergh (book)
Billy Wilder (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

20 April 1957 (USA)

Genre:

Adventure | Biography | Drama | History

Tagline:

The Story Behind the Story of Lindbergh's Incredible Flight to Paris!

Plot:

Charles 'Slim' Lindbergh struggles to finance and design an airplane that will make his New York to Paris flight the first solo transatlantic crossing.

Plot Keywords:

Transatlantic | New York | Aviation | Pilot | Ireland

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar.

Cast

James Stewart	...	Charles Augustus 'Slim' Lindbergh
Murray Hamilton	...	Bud Gurney
Patricia Smith	...	Mirror Girl
Bartlett Robinson	...	Benjamin Frank Mahoney, President Ryan Airlines Co.
Marc Connelly	...	Father Hussman
Arthur Space	...	Donald Hall, Chief Engineer Ryan Airlines
Charles Watts	...	O.W. Schultz, Salesman Atlas Suspender Co.

Runtime:

135 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound Recording) | 4-Track Stereo

Certification:

Iceland:L | UK:U | Finland:S | West Germany:6 | USA:Approved (certificate #17794)

Filming Locations:

Guyancourt, Yvelines, France

Company:

Billy Wilder Productions

Trivia:

James Stewart was given the role of Charles Lindbergh after John Kerr had turned it down, owing to his disapproval of Lindbergh's pro-Nazi sympathies and his racist and anti-Semitic views. This was despite the fears of the producers that Stewart was too old for the part.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: When Lindbergh arrives back at St. Louis with the newly built Spirit of St Louis, he taxies up to the building where one of his banker friends is waiting for him. Lindbergh then gets out of the plane and starts fingering the still hot cylinders of the engine. He certainly would be cautious about touching an engine that had just been running for many hours for fear of burning his skin off.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Reporter: [checking his copy] Here at the Garden City Hotel, less than a mile from Roosevelt Field... less than three-quarters of a mile from Roosevelt Field... everyone is waiting, as they have been now for seven days and nights, waiting for the rain to stop...

Movie Connections:

Referenced in The Goodbye Girl (2004) (TV)

Soundtrack:

Spirit of Independence

Quite uplifting, this rather forgotten Wilder

Someone once said to me that there are only four basic movie plots: the first, boy meets girl: the second, man against apparently insuperable odds: the others.....I can't remember. Although I am not by nature agoraphobic, I guess when it comes to cinema I prefer the cosily domestic to wide open spaces. Every so often, however, I find myself responding to man battling it out against the elements, particularly if the point is being made that, without the sheer determination of an individual to grapple with prejudice and ignorance, civilization would not gain a pace or two forward. Billy Wilder's epic of human endeavour, "The Spirit of St. Louis", is just such an instance. It is heaps better than most in this category mainly through the excellent central performance by James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh, the first successful transatlantic flyer. True, Stewart was twice the age of the man he was portraying but he brilliantly manages the demeanour of a much younger person and has the advantage of being one of the very few actors able to convey the determined obsessive fanaticism that Lindbergh must have possessed. One can admire Wilder's skill in sustaining audience interest throughout what is essentially a one character and a one scene film but he achieves it through interspersing the present from the night before the takeoff, with flashbacks that retell the background to the mission, each a little story in itself, some quite tense such as Lindbergh's adventurous flight during a blizzard when he was a flying mail courier and others rather droll such as giving a flying lesson to a priest who is the most incompetent would-be aviator ever. The main journey once it gets going is mainly smooth and something of a leisurely travelogue with nice views over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on the way. Far more dramatic is the takeoff during foul weather from a rain drenched runway in which Stewart grapples with his tiny aircraft narrowly clearing pylons and a clump of trees. The miracle that so flimsy a machine could make it not only for a few miles but across a vast ocean is reinforced by the hazardous implications of this wonderfully atmospheric sequence in a way that make the journey and the arrival in Paris quite uplifting.